Oddities: A series of unnatural events

I MUST report a handful of intriguing natural events occurring around Courtmacsherry Bay during the festival and regatta held last week.

The weather itself was unusual: that is to say, the sun shone.

The Golden Pheasant, a cafe/gift shop with stylish house and gardens facing the sea always had aviaries housing exotic pheasant species, including the eponymous fowl and its relation, a Lady Amherst’s pheasant.

Recently, one of the aviaries was given over to an eagle owl, cage-bred in Britain, later imported to Ireland and, due to unforeseen circumstances in need of a home. Eagle owls are native to most of northern Europe and Russia and are huge birds, with a 6ft wingspan. They are capable of taking a gyrfalcon — king of the falcons — in mid-air or a dog on the ground.

Over the past few weeks, a young fox has been industriously trying to dig its way into the aviary, probably attracted by the scent of wild rabbit carcasses on which the bird is fed. The owl sits motionless on its perch, watching it through half-closed eyes.

Until the recent successful introduction of golden eagles in Donegal, generations of Irish foxes have had nothing to fear from the skies. However, if it finally succeeds in accessing the aviary, the unfortunate cub may suddenly find the sun blotted out overhead and, instead of enjoying its hard-earned dinner, find it is on the menu itself.

Meanwhile, in a garden just down the street, a kestrel has taken to hunting bats as they emerge from under the house eaves at twilight. This is unique behaviour for a kestrel. But, of course, bats are essentially flying mice, although, as insectivores, they might not be as tasty as a grain-fed field mouse.

Bees suddenly swarmed in the same garden a few Sundays ago on Courtmacsherry Regatta Day. It has long been observed that when bees swarm, it is, often, on a Sunday, and there is a popular theory that it is the ringing of church bells, shaking the air, that triggers the swarm. In this case, they swarmed long after local Masses or services and it was suggested that it was the Tannoy announcing the progress of the regatta that caused them to take to the air.

On our first day of summer, July 30, a friend of my son’s, attending to boats on Courtmacsherry pier, was surprised to find a baby otter wandering about, unafraid. He wondered if it had lost its parent and fed it a bit of fish. He then picked it up and it didn’t struggle or bite; however, it can’t have been entirely comfortable because it soon jumped into the bay.

Concerned for its safety, he followed it out in a boat and picked it up again in mid-channel. Having established that it was perfectly sound and capable, he let it go and it swam off, perfectly at home in the waters of the bay.

On National Whale Watch Day, Sunday, August 5, some 300 would-be cetacean-spotters assembled at Galley Head in west Cork to scan the ocean. No whales surfaced but pods of dolphins came well within binocular range. Harbour porpoises were also seen, as well as a giant leatherback turtle, circumnavigating the North Atlantic from its nesting beaches on the Caribbean.

Their annual journey begins when they drift north to the freezing waters off Greenland, dense with jellyfish at that time of year. After feeding, they drift south again, pass along the Irish coast, and turn west near the equator where the Canaries Current sweeps them home to the Caribbean.

There was some disappointment that Boomerang, a humpback whale which, for the past five years has arrived off Galley Head in mid-August, wasn’t sighted. The whale is apparently cruising off Tramore but may well come west any day, feeding on herring, sauries or mackerel and following the shoals.

These shoals are dangerously depleted elsewhere as a result of shifts in plankton distribution due to climate change. Starvation among young seabirds may be outward signs of an impending collapse of coastal ecosystems in Scottish and Northern Irish waters. Guillemots, seabirds which dive up to 90m after prey, have been found foraging in small streams, and even in ponds in central Glasgow.

Meanwhile, as bird numbers and species decline, we begin to better understand their value. Electronic tags attached to sooty shearwaters reveal that they migrate up to 64,370km annually from New Zealand to Alaska, travelling 910km each day and diving to depths of 68m while feeding en route. The numbers successfully completing the journey are useful indicators of the effects of climate change or overfishing in the vast Pacific. Migrant Atlantic shearwaters can be similarly tagged.